The Fancy : Pinterest for Men

If you’re one of those guys thinking Pinterest is just for girls, and can’t bring yourself to adopt it despite its stunning growth, you might check out The Fancy – part store, part magazine, part bookmarking – a tool to curate the things that define you. It’s a bit like Pinterest, but sleeker, cooler, more minimal, and more provocative. It’s luxury. And women, don’t be shy; you can Fancy as well (the break down is about 60:40, male:female). Backed by the likes of Kanye, Jack Dorsey, Andreessen Horowitz, and PPR, Fancy is certainly not lacking street cred or style.

Aside from demographics, monetization is another characteristic that separates Fancy from Pinterest. Fancy members can browse deals and sales – literally shop the photos. The entire checkout process takes place on Fancy, rather than linking out to the merchant’s website. Ultimately, Fancy plans to “support a Google-like bidding system, except instead of keywords, merchants will be bidding on the demand surrounding users’ clipped postings” as detailed in a recent TechCrunch piece.

Pinterest has shown some promise for monetization as well, with functionality to tag images with prices making them more shoppable. But, as Jeremy Levins acknowledged, their strategy “isn’t in the oven and it’s not even off the baking table”. Some of the more inventive efforts have been from the brands using Pinterest rather than Pinterst itself, such as Gilt Baby & Kids’ “Pin it to Unlock” campaign. Group buying, meet pinning. Gilt posts an image, and once it’s been re-pinned 50 times, the pin links to an exclusive, hidden sale on Gilt.com.

So while Pinterest and Fancy share some common functionality, their strategies are entirely different. It’s a race to see who can crack the social commerce nut first.